You don't have to force people to choose what you want or bar them from doing what you don't want. You simply create people with an innate "goodness" or even with a neutral inclination and let them wander, live, learn, and grow from there.
Instead, such a deity would have created humans as they are now, with a natural inclination to dominance, greed, fear, and rape.
Just because dominating others is possible and free will means letting us choose to try to do so doesn't mean that a deity would have to create us with the innate desire to make the wrong choice.
On the other hand, all of these human weaknesses make perfect sense as a result of a natural evolutionary process in a physical reality.
You are right. If a parent consented to let someone else light their child on fire while they watched. All as part of a bet that the child would still love the parent afterward. They wouldn't be worthy of being a flawed mortal parent in my mind, let alone an all powerful perfect god worthy of my worship.
But hey that's just me. I mean a billion Christians (let alone Muslims and Jews) all believe that story in which god does worse than let the devil light Job on fire while he watches and seem to reach a different conclusion.
Evil is not needed in order to know hardship or free will. Neither are base instincts that compel people to choose the evil.
For instance a good child can just as easily touch a stove and learn from the experience as a bad child. Evil is not required for there to be a wrong course and hardship is not required for there to be a wrong course.
Also, a child is not a creation. A child is born ignorant and if a child does not learn a lesson a child will not have the knowledge that lesson teaches. Like that a stove is hot and touching it will burn the child.
An omnipotent deity however can always create a being that already has the wisdom innately that the deity itself has without touching hot stoves.
What is the purpose of making the beings come to the exact same knowledge and conclusions via suffering? To make the deity distinct and privileged? Because the deity enjoys the suffering? Or because the deity does not care? Or is it because the deity is not perfect, all knowing, and omnipotent?
You continue to make the false premise that a desire to do evil things is required to make choices but that is not true. Supposedly Jesus was god manifested on Earth and not at all evil and yet he certainly made choices and exercised free will.
I do not discount the possibility of a creator. Or even the possibility that the creator is generally good natured or worthy of companionship or friendship, even respect. But I do discount the possibility of a creator worthy of worship.
If I wrote an AI program that had to be trained and grown as a child to reach humanlike intelligence I would be its creator. But that doesn't mean I would suddenly be worthy of worship or flawless.
'Basically: How would you (or the majority of Slashdotters here) feel if, say, marketing graduates were sent to try to convince people to buy a copy of Windows on Linux and Mac boards and mailing lists? Or viceversa. 'Cause I for one would see it as worsening the signal-to-noise ratio, regardless of how it's done.'
Replace marketing graduates with genuine paid marketing posters and proponents and I say welcome to slashdot.
Job is a good example of why if the Christian/Jewish/Muslim god did exist, he wouldn't be worthy of worship anyway.
Seriously, I'm supposed to bow to some prick who would make his most devout follower go through extreme torments and kill off his family over a bet? Is it really supposed to be better that afterward he gave Job a cut?
Just one bone to pick here. The phrase "just a theory" isn't a misunderstanding of what a theory is, its a reminder. Nothing can be definitively proven and nothing should be treated as if it has been definitively proven.
It may take a thousand years to make a fundamental break with evolutionary theory. I wouldn't know what that alternative explanation could possibly be but that doesn't mean one won't come in time, perhaps as a result of fundamental discoveries in other sciences and physics.
The idea that because there are no laws in science means that theories should be treated as laws is a misnomer. There are no laws in science because treating something as if it were a law is unscientific.
"It's just a theory" is reminder that theories ARE still up in the air and always will be.
Those is a bogus assertion and not scientific at all. In true science there are claims and observation, there is no such thing as extraordinary.
Extraordinary is a concept that comes about due to the flaws of human nature. It is man, and not science that develops beliefs and becomes more firmly attached to hypothesis and theories as time passes without conflicting observation. It is man who raises the bar for conflicting observation as time passes as well thus making him less likely to accept conflicting observation.
Science does none of this. Science does not use a moving bar. If an observation would have required a change to or fundamentally broken a hypothesis or theory the day it was proposed the same observation should carry equal weight and require the same preponderance of evidence thirty years later.
An example of this is a hypothesis of extra-terrestrial visitation of Earth. There are thousands of examples of video, photographic, and eye witness observations. If someone credible makes the observation or records the photo/video etc than rather than accepting the observation as valid the credibility of the person is called into question.
On the other hand, two separate individuals claiming to have seen a new species in the amazon, one with a photograph would likely be enough to form a consensus that said creature exists.
According to the scientific method neither claim is extraordinary and neither should have a different burden of proof. It is a flaw of man and the way our minds work that two individuals with plenty of reason for bias (like say, an interest in continued funding) with a single photo would be readily accepted where an alien craft flying behind a reporter on a live CNN broadcast would likely be discounted.
no doubt but the recognized scientific community relies on census and thus is in fact an organization that is rife with dogmas. That organization even uses journals to censor and silence dissent.
Actually it is. Your son is a conglomeration of genetics carried by you and his mother and short of picking who you wanted to polish your knob you had no say in any of that.
A supposed God on the other hand is supposedly all knowing and all powerful and could easily have chosen to create good natured creatures. He could then have given those good natured creatures free will to dramatically different result.
Instead, this God would have created us. We are innately vicious creatures filled by our creature (be it nature or god) with drives that inevitably lead to murder, torture, rape, etc if we are given free will. Even we know we shouldn't have free will, that is why there aren't too many people anywhere who are proponents of true anarchy.
"Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies"
I would love to believe that is true. Those sort of ridiculous and cumbersome rules are included in doctrine that is common to the Jewish faith, the Christian faith, and the Muslim faith. Without that branch of religion the world would be a much better and far less ignorant place.
Wiccans, Buddists, and atheists have some sort of faith (although many who call themselves atheists are actually just holding out for evidence and therefore agnostic and not taking anything on faith) but they are faiths that are not hostile to those who do not share them. They are faiths without hellfire and they do not try to tell their adherents what they can and can not do.
In that way they are much like the Egyptian faith that the Jewish people adapted to make up their faith.
I doubt what you describe is a thousand years away. We already have the core technologies for most of what you describe and its just a matter of progressive advancements to get there. If we didn't achieve some form of electronic brain/computer assisted telepathy within the next 50 years I'd be astonished.
Yeah, because the republicans are so seriously against deregulation. I mean it isn't as if they preach deregulation and the free market as the solution to every problem and claim its because the market wasn't 'truly free' due to whatever regulation is left when it definitively doesn't work.
Wake up morons, both the D's and the R's are on the same team and that team enjoys ramming a turbo thrust dildo up your ass.
Still not so hot, now if they could use an injection or pill of some sort that would go around in an aidslike fashion turning this little critter on so that it wasn't yet another impediment to spontaneous and full contact sex they'd be on to something.
You know. I just realized that there is actually a condition under which I might consider castration... phantom blowjob syndrom. Where my phantom member always feels like I'm getting head.
Just let her have what she wants when it doesn't matter so you can have what you want when it does. Of course you should always pretend that the nonsense she thinks is interesting and important actually is and that you are listening as she rambles on and on and on and on about it.
She should do the same in turn.
Aside from that, put the toilet seat down and always put your dishes in the dishwasher.
Oh yeah, and always remember that what she says she wants, particularly when it comes to sex, is rarely what she wants. Generally they want to be treated like a dirty whore piece of meat in practice. They want it hard and nasty. Even though they claim to want it soft, gentle, long in duration, and touchy feely. Fuck em hard and often to the point that they complain their various crevices are swollen and swore, then tap it again.
Again, they won't admit it. In fact, there will probably be a woman or two chiming in saying something to the contrary and no doubt there will be a 90's metro-sexual mumbling something about caring and sharing. Trust me, ignore them all and listen to me and she'll have multiple orgasms within 5-15 minutes of intercourse and that in simple missionary and doggy style. It's all mental for them so as long as you handle things properly the physical part CAN be the way we want it and still be very satisfying to both.
Fair enough (even if that is only a small portion of larger companies and not a portion of smaller ones, and if law firms weren't using word perfect rather than ms word), but I covered that:
"If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download."
Instead of a blanket legislative ban of an entire technology for all government contracts from a lawnmowing gig at the park to super secret defense contracts they need to be investigating why the hell a third party contracter of any clearance level had this information. This is information that only a few need to know secret servicemen should have... even the president himself doesn't need to know this information until the route or location is actually utilized.
Exactly. When you say government contracts people immediately think defense contracts and sensitive information. They also think of big contracts and companies that pretty much do the contract work exclusively or dedicate a big part of their company to doing said work.
There are no shortage of companies handling small contracts that really just amount to another of their many many clients. It is a bad idea to exclude these companies if they do better work simply because they have an existing work process that might include some sort of P2P process.
Actually I think we need to cut the military in terms of budget. Our military budget is larger than the combined military budget of all of Europe. And I'm only referring to our peacetime budget before Iraq.
There is simply no reason the military needs 300+ billion a year. They don't even need 1/10th of that. For 1/100th of what we are spending to be the worlds most efficient brown people killers we could fund a complete and comprehensive national healthcare system.
I say we give 100 billion back in tax cuts, by eliminating all taxes on wages (except the top 10% to keep the CEO's from avoiding taxes on their millions by taking salaries again and less stock). If you've accumulated wealth and can live off investment returns that is great, but since you are using your share of resources and not contributing your share of labor you can only expect that you should have to repay those who are picking up your slack in the form of taxes.
Keep 30 bil for the military, that is plenty and then some. And yes go ahead and spend not the mere 3 but the 6 bil for a national healthcare system. As a bonus, cutting the military budget will likely result in less need for medical spending in the first place.
The difference? Obviously that should just be given to me as an annual allowance for devising this brilliant cost saving plan and bringing health and prosperity to all.
Agreed, and if your people are like the people I deal with day in and day out, they don't even use Outlook for email capabilities, they use it for calendering and sharing capabilities.
Is the functionality of outlook really that difficult to replicate? This stuff is used by virtually every small to medium sized business in the US. If every alternative solution that came out didn't take the greedy approach trying to squeeze them for every client then it might be possible to get somewhere. You could get very rich selling a server/client groupware suite that could import data from outlook/exchange, use outlook as a client, and included say 50 client licenses for two or three hundred dollars.
Most companies don't actually exchange anything on the level of a word document with third parties regularly, it just doesn't make sense. How often do you need someone outside your company to send you a document you can edit? For that matter, how often do you send editable documents?
Most companies I have worked with exchange communications in emails and documents in PDF files or the appropriate graphics file for artwork. Word just isn't a reasonable expectation for interchange, you simply can not expect your customers to keep a copy of a $250-400 program on hand that barely offers an advantage over a free download and for most users doesn't even offer an advantage over wordpad.
If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download.
There are thousands of companies (including at least half the law offices out there) that use word perfect for their word processing and they don't seem to have issues with no ms word compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to force people to choose what you want or bar them from doing what you don't want. You simply create people with an innate "goodness" or even with a neutral inclination and let them wander, live, learn, and grow from there.
Instead, such a deity would have created humans as they are now, with a natural inclination to dominance, greed, fear, and rape.
Just because dominating others is possible and free will means letting us choose to try to do so doesn't mean that a deity would have to create us with the innate desire to make the wrong choice.
On the other hand, all of these human weaknesses make perfect sense as a result of a natural evolutionary process in a physical reality.
In other words, you don't have 65k emails your outlook mailbox. Thank you, move along.
You are right. If a parent consented to let someone else light their child on fire while they watched. All as part of a bet that the child would still love the parent afterward. They wouldn't be worthy of being a flawed mortal parent in my mind, let alone an all powerful perfect god worthy of my worship.
But hey that's just me. I mean a billion Christians (let alone Muslims and Jews) all believe that story in which god does worse than let the devil light Job on fire while he watches and seem to reach a different conclusion.
Evil is not needed in order to know hardship or free will. Neither are base instincts that compel people to choose the evil.
For instance a good child can just as easily touch a stove and learn from the experience as a bad child. Evil is not required for there to be a wrong course and hardship is not required for there to be a wrong course.
Also, a child is not a creation. A child is born ignorant and if a child does not learn a lesson a child will not have the knowledge that lesson teaches. Like that a stove is hot and touching it will burn the child.
An omnipotent deity however can always create a being that already has the wisdom innately that the deity itself has without touching hot stoves.
What is the purpose of making the beings come to the exact same knowledge and conclusions via suffering? To make the deity distinct and privileged? Because the deity enjoys the suffering? Or because the deity does not care? Or is it because the deity is not perfect, all knowing, and omnipotent?
You continue to make the false premise that a desire to do evil things is required to make choices but that is not true. Supposedly Jesus was god manifested on Earth and not at all evil and yet he certainly made choices and exercised free will.
I do not discount the possibility of a creator. Or even the possibility that the creator is generally good natured or worthy of companionship or friendship, even respect. But I do discount the possibility of a creator worthy of worship.
If I wrote an AI program that had to be trained and grown as a child to reach humanlike intelligence I would be its creator. But that doesn't mean I would suddenly be worthy of worship or flawless.
'Basically: How would you (or the majority of Slashdotters here) feel if, say, marketing graduates were sent to try to convince people to buy a copy of Windows on Linux and Mac boards and mailing lists? Or viceversa. 'Cause I for one would see it as worsening the signal-to-noise ratio, regardless of how it's done.'
Replace marketing graduates with genuine paid marketing posters and proponents and I say welcome to slashdot.
Job is a good example of why if the Christian/Jewish/Muslim god did exist, he wouldn't be worthy of worship anyway.
Seriously, I'm supposed to bow to some prick who would make his most devout follower go through extreme torments and kill off his family over a bet? Is it really supposed to be better that afterward he gave Job a cut?
Just one bone to pick here. The phrase "just a theory" isn't a misunderstanding of what a theory is, its a reminder. Nothing can be definitively proven and nothing should be treated as if it has been definitively proven.
It may take a thousand years to make a fundamental break with evolutionary theory. I wouldn't know what that alternative explanation could possibly be but that doesn't mean one won't come in time, perhaps as a result of fundamental discoveries in other sciences and physics.
The idea that because there are no laws in science means that theories should be treated as laws is a misnomer. There are no laws in science because treating something as if it were a law is unscientific.
"It's just a theory" is reminder that theories ARE still up in the air and always will be.
Those is a bogus assertion and not scientific at all. In true science there are claims and observation, there is no such thing as extraordinary.
Extraordinary is a concept that comes about due to the flaws of human nature. It is man, and not science that develops beliefs and becomes more firmly attached to hypothesis and theories as time passes without conflicting observation. It is man who raises the bar for conflicting observation as time passes as well thus making him less likely to accept conflicting observation.
Science does none of this. Science does not use a moving bar. If an observation would have required a change to or fundamentally broken a hypothesis or theory the day it was proposed the same observation should carry equal weight and require the same preponderance of evidence thirty years later.
An example of this is a hypothesis of extra-terrestrial visitation of Earth. There are thousands of examples of video, photographic, and eye witness observations. If someone credible makes the observation or records the photo/video etc than rather than accepting the observation as valid the credibility of the person is called into question.
On the other hand, two separate individuals claiming to have seen a new species in the amazon, one with a photograph would likely be enough to form a consensus that said creature exists.
According to the scientific method neither claim is extraordinary and neither should have a different burden of proof. It is a flaw of man and the way our minds work that two individuals with plenty of reason for bias (like say, an interest in continued funding) with a single photo would be readily accepted where an alien craft flying behind a reporter on a live CNN broadcast would likely be discounted.
no doubt but the recognized scientific community relies on census and thus is in fact an organization that is rife with dogmas. That organization even uses journals to censor and silence dissent.
Actually it is. Your son is a conglomeration of genetics carried by you and his mother and short of picking who you wanted to polish your knob you had no say in any of that.
A supposed God on the other hand is supposedly all knowing and all powerful and could easily have chosen to create good natured creatures. He could then have given those good natured creatures free will to dramatically different result.
Instead, this God would have created us. We are innately vicious creatures filled by our creature (be it nature or god) with drives that inevitably lead to murder, torture, rape, etc if we are given free will. Even we know we shouldn't have free will, that is why there aren't too many people anywhere who are proponents of true anarchy.
"Yes, religions that say "no one can ever have sex and if you do you must kill any resulting babies"
I would love to believe that is true. Those sort of ridiculous and cumbersome rules are included in doctrine that is common to the Jewish faith, the Christian faith, and the Muslim faith. Without that branch of religion the world would be a much better and far less ignorant place.
Wiccans, Buddists, and atheists have some sort of faith (although many who call themselves atheists are actually just holding out for evidence and therefore agnostic and not taking anything on faith) but they are faiths that are not hostile to those who do not share them. They are faiths without hellfire and they do not try to tell their adherents what they can and can not do.
In that way they are much like the Egyptian faith that the Jewish people adapted to make up their faith.
I doubt what you describe is a thousand years away. We already have the core technologies for most of what you describe and its just a matter of progressive advancements to get there. If we didn't achieve some form of electronic brain/computer assisted telepathy within the next 50 years I'd be astonished.
Yeah, because the republicans are so seriously against deregulation. I mean it isn't as if they preach deregulation and the free market as the solution to every problem and claim its because the market wasn't 'truly free' due to whatever regulation is left when it definitively doesn't work.
Wake up morons, both the D's and the R's are on the same team and that team enjoys ramming a turbo thrust dildo up your ass.
Still not so hot, now if they could use an injection or pill of some sort that would go around in an aidslike fashion turning this little critter on so that it wasn't yet another impediment to spontaneous and full contact sex they'd be on to something.
You know. I just realized that there is actually a condition under which I might consider castration... phantom blowjob syndrom. Where my phantom member always feels like I'm getting head.
Just let her have what she wants when it doesn't matter so you can have what you want when it does. Of course you should always pretend that the nonsense she thinks is interesting and important actually is and that you are listening as she rambles on and on and on and on about it.
She should do the same in turn.
Aside from that, put the toilet seat down and always put your dishes in the dishwasher.
Oh yeah, and always remember that what she says she wants, particularly when it comes to sex, is rarely what she wants. Generally they want to be treated like a dirty whore piece of meat in practice. They want it hard and nasty. Even though they claim to want it soft, gentle, long in duration, and touchy feely. Fuck em hard and often to the point that they complain their various crevices are swollen and swore, then tap it again.
Again, they won't admit it. In fact, there will probably be a woman or two chiming in saying something to the contrary and no doubt there will be a 90's metro-sexual mumbling something about caring and sharing. Trust me, ignore them all and listen to me and she'll have multiple orgasms within 5-15 minutes of intercourse and that in simple missionary and doggy style. It's all mental for them so as long as you handle things properly the physical part CAN be the way we want it and still be very satisfying to both.
Fair enough (even if that is only a small portion of larger companies and not a portion of smaller ones, and if law firms weren't using word perfect rather than ms word), but I covered that:
"If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download."
Instead of a blanket legislative ban of an entire technology for all government contracts from a lawnmowing gig at the park to super secret defense contracts they need to be investigating why the hell a third party contracter of any clearance level had this information. This is information that only a few need to know secret servicemen should have... even the president himself doesn't need to know this information until the route or location is actually utilized.
Exactly. When you say government contracts people immediately think defense contracts and sensitive information. They also think of big contracts and companies that pretty much do the contract work exclusively or dedicate a big part of their company to doing said work.
There are no shortage of companies handling small contracts that really just amount to another of their many many clients. It is a bad idea to exclude these companies if they do better work simply because they have an existing work process that might include some sort of P2P process.
You do realize that most government contracts don't require clearance and aren't even the only work done by the company contracted right?
You are confusing government contracts with defense contracts I think.
Actually I think we need to cut the military in terms of budget. Our military budget is larger than the combined military budget of all of Europe. And I'm only referring to our peacetime budget before Iraq.
There is simply no reason the military needs 300+ billion a year. They don't even need 1/10th of that. For 1/100th of what we are spending to be the worlds most efficient brown people killers we could fund a complete and comprehensive national healthcare system.
I say we give 100 billion back in tax cuts, by eliminating all taxes on wages (except the top 10% to keep the CEO's from avoiding taxes on their millions by taking salaries again and less stock). If you've accumulated wealth and can live off investment returns that is great, but since you are using your share of resources and not contributing your share of labor you can only expect that you should have to repay those who are picking up your slack in the form of taxes.
Keep 30 bil for the military, that is plenty and then some. And yes go ahead and spend not the mere 3 but the 6 bil for a national healthcare system. As a bonus, cutting the military budget will likely result in less need for medical spending in the first place.
The difference? Obviously that should just be given to me as an annual allowance for devising this brilliant cost saving plan and bringing health and prosperity to all.
Agreed, and if your people are like the people I deal with day in and day out, they don't even use Outlook for email capabilities, they use it for calendering and sharing capabilities.
Is the functionality of outlook really that difficult to replicate? This stuff is used by virtually every small to medium sized business in the US. If every alternative solution that came out didn't take the greedy approach trying to squeeze them for every client then it might be possible to get somewhere. You could get very rich selling a server/client groupware suite that could import data from outlook/exchange, use outlook as a client, and included say 50 client licenses for two or three hundred dollars.
On a similar note, outlook also fails with no more than a few thousand emails.
Most companies don't actually exchange anything on the level of a word document with third parties regularly, it just doesn't make sense. How often do you need someone outside your company to send you a document you can edit? For that matter, how often do you send editable documents?
Most companies I have worked with exchange communications in emails and documents in PDF files or the appropriate graphics file for artwork. Word just isn't a reasonable expectation for interchange, you simply can not expect your customers to keep a copy of a $250-400 program on hand that barely offers an advantage over a free download and for most users doesn't even offer an advantage over wordpad.
If you really need editable documents sent back and forth than simply post a required format. People rarely object if your required format is an open standard and all they need is a free download.
There are thousands of companies (including at least half the law offices out there) that use word perfect for their word processing and they don't seem to have issues with no ms word compatibility.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1323991&cid=28931489